Now for something different: Prototheca, pathogenic algae (2021)

journals.plos.org

8 points·6177c40f··6 comments

Primarily, the antimycotic amphotericin B (a polyene) is used for treating protothecosis caused by P. wickerhamii.

Interestingly and worryingly, there are very few antimycotics and there aren't enough new ones in the pharma pipeline. C. auris is on the verge of being untreatable because of resistances to all 3 classes: triazoles, polyenes, and echinocandins.

PS: IANA[LD]

Something I wonder about is whether anti-malarials would work against Prototheca as well, given that some have herbicidal properties. My cursory search for whether they've been tried turns up nothing, which is unsurprising given the rarity of the disease.

A genus of non-photosynthetic algae.

>The mechanisms by which algae are able to infect hosts and cause disease are currently unknown.

If we ever found and wanted to colonize a near-Earthlike world with a native biosphere the undertaking would seem to be highly hazardous since we don't even understand how some of our native pathogens work.

IMO, the biggest fantasy in Star Wars is that everyone wouldn’t have died long before from galaxy spanning plagues - over and over again.

This has me thinking, there must be some intersection point, where a civilization can't grow any larger while staying connected because it'd create new diseases faster than the medicine of the time could develop cures/treatments/vaccines.

Probably directly related to ease/speed of travel and how controllable it would be too. In Star Wars, random joes seem capable of rapid and uncontrolled movement between arbitrary star systems with little to no possible border control, which would make it really easy to spread everything, and impossible to stop. Even planetary blockades seem ineffective.

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